Stephanie Seneff

[Edit Stephanie Seneff] Position: Principal Research Scientist Office: 32-G438 Phone: +1 (617) 253-0451 Email: Areas of Study: Language & Learning Personal Website Last Update: July 9, 2008 Download vCard

Biography

Stephanie Seneff received her SB, SM, and PhD degrees from MIT. Her research in speech and language has spanned nearly thirty years at MIT, covering many aspects of the speech chain, from signals to symbols to meaning. Her early research, at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the seventies, included synthesis, coding, feature extraction, and recognition. Her doctoral thesis, completed in 1985, concerned a model for human auditory processing of speech, and its application to computer speech recognition.

Since 1989, her research has primarily focused on natural language processing for speech, encompassing phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, speech generation, discourse and dialogue. She has consistently pursued a research paradigm that involves testing theoretical ideas in the context of real conversational systems in a number of different domains and languages. She is especially interested in the concept of Web-based interactive dialogue as an aid for second language acquisition.

Publications

• S. Seneff, "Interactive Computer Aids for Acquiring Proficiency in Mandarin," Keynote Speech, pp. 1--11, Proc. ISCSLP, Singapore, 2006.
• S. Seneff, "The Use of Subword Linguistic Modeling for Multiple Tasks in Speech Recognition," Speech Communication, Vol. 42, No. 3-4, pp. 373--390, 2004.
• S. Seneff, "Response Planning and Generation in the Mercury Flight Reservation System," Computer Speech and Language, Vol. 16, pp. 283--312, 2002.
• S. Seneff, "TINA: A Natural Language System for Spoken Language Applications," Computational Linguistics, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 61-86, 1992.
• S. Seneff, "A Joint Synchrony/Mean-rate Model of Auditory Speech Processing," Journal of Phonetics, Vol. 16, pp. 55--76, 1988.